A blog about individual and community development using new information and communication technologies, especially e-learning, open educational resources, open source, Web 2.0, blogs, wikis, social networking, social bookmarking, semantic web and other social software.

2014-10-30

Everykey is a wristband that replaces keys and passwords. It’s sleek, easy to use, and can be deactivated at any time. Everykey is an innovative universal access device for everything that requires a physical key or password. The Everykey wristband is an attractive Bluetooth enabled band that allows immediate access to a user’s password-protected electronics …

2014-10-25

Worldreader is on a mission to bring digital books to every child and her family, so that they can improve their lives. Here’s how they do it:

The increasing ubiquity and diminishing costs of digital technology enable us to solve these problems in a simple and straight-forward way. Wherever possible, we build on digital platforms and mobile connectivity in the developing world to make our books available to children and families who need them the most.

We provide e-readers to schools in need through both sponsorships and sales.

2014-10-23

Botswana’s first private university, the Malaysian-owned Limkokwing University of Creative Technology, has become the country’s first fully licensed private tertiary institution, after seven years of operating under an interim licence.

Vice-chancellor Dr Raphael Dingalo said staff and students were upbeat about the development, announced early last month – just before the graduation of more than 900 students, from several African countries.

“We are the first and only private tertiary institution in Botswana at present to be awarded the full university licence,” said Dingalo.

EdTechReview’s new initiative in the space of Open Education Resources (OER) is focused at bringing learning material from the best teachers to the students at a very low cost and faculty development.

For this initiative EdTechReview, India’s Premier EdTech Community has partnered with Progia LLC, a US based company with expertise in the use and creation of OER. Under this project, ETR has started to offer Open Educational Resources (OER) oriented awareness Programs, hands-on Workshops and Services to create courses using OER. These offerings are focused at entrepreneurs, faculties/teachers, authors and policy makers.

2014-10-20

The Patient Innovation project aims to create an international, multilingual, non-profit platform and social network to connect patients and caregivers, and enable the sharing of their solutions. If not shared, these strategies, treatments, devices and knowledge would probably remain unknown to many patients, not fulfilling their potential of changing other people's lives.

2014-10-18

The latest version of Flickr has been optimized for iOS 8 and Apple's Retina displays. The app can display photos in high resolution — up to 3 million pixels per image, according to Flickr.

"No matter the context of your photo adventures — whether you’re socializing with friends, trekking through a market in a faraway city or capturing the most important memories at a family wedding — you’ll never lose a pixel of the full resolution, uncompressed photos in your Flickr account," the company wrote in a blog post. "And with the 1,000GB of free storage, you can upload all your photos not just your favorites!"

2014-10-14

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, told the IPExpo Europe in London’s Excel Centre that the potential of big data will be wasted as its current owners use it to serve ever more “queasy” targeted advertising.

2014-10-10

A $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation will allow computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University to begin construction of a database called LearnSphere that will act as a repository for data for researchers studying the effects on students taking online courses.

2014-10-08

A global shortage of teachers has pressured many countries into hiring educators with little or no training, undermining the educational progress of numerous school-age children around the world, the United Nations education agency warned today.

2014-10-04

This week, a team of researchers out of MIT, Harvard, and China’s Tsinghua University — all schools that offer MOOCs — released a study showing that students who attended a MIT physics class online learned as effectively as students who took the class in person. What’s more, the results were the same, regardless of how well the online students scored on a pre-test before taking the class.

Studies like the one from MIT are providing new fuel for people like Anant Agarwal, an MIT computer science professor and the CEO of the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based non-profit, edX, one of several purveyors of so-called “massively open online courses,” or MOOCs, which offer free online classes from elite universities to anyone in the world. It’s an affirmation of the very thing they’ve been saying all along: that it’s possible to get a quality college education without the hefty price tag.

2014-10-03

Emile Petrone founded Tindie for selfish reasons. “The basic idea was that there wasn’t a marketplace for the things I was interested in,” he says. At the time, those things were his latest DIY hardware obsessions—specifically, kits to support Arduino and Raspberry Pi. “Ebay’s not really right, and neither is Amazon. Hardware projects had no natural home.”

Just as Etsy became the go-to marketplace for craft creators, Tindie has become the primary hub for hardware aficionados.

2014-10-01

A new MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) offering an in-person twist — local weekly facilitated meetings — debuts next week to help future and current college STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) faculty become better teachers. It is designed to be of special interest to grad students planning to teach professionally.

On Wednesday morning, Hillary Clinton and Former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced a new Clinton Global Initiative commitment with the Center on Universal Education at the Brookings Institution for girls’ education called CHARGE (The Collaborative for Harnessing Ambition and Resources for Girls Education). The initiative will include 30 other partners, including governments like the United States and organizations from the private sector, committing $600 million to reach 14 million girls around the world in the next five years. Gillard, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, approached Secretary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton a year ago to work together on the initiative.

Zambia has the 3rd largest copper reserves in the world, but 60% of the population live on less than $1 a day and 80% are unemployed. Based on original research into public documents, the film describes the tax system employed by multinational companies in Africa.